Flexible crises
Erica and I talk about crises a lot, and we’re always trying to improve them. As a quick reminder, crises are extended skill check scenes for exciting non-combat tasks, like surgery or defusing a bomb. They’re usually made up of three or more stages, preferably with a complication partway through, like nicking an artery or coming under fire while wrist-deep in a bomb case.
Sometimes, players help out with that by adding their own ideas to a crisis. So what does a crisis look like? Why use them? And what happens when the players throw in something that you didn’t plan?
Our very first crisis scene was in a friend’s sky-pirate game, when the party’s airship was struck by lightning. The player character engineer had to climb out onto the ship during the storm to repair our burning engine, hanging on against fierce winds and driving rain. There were athletics checks and repair rolls, and complications when gusting wind blew the ship — and the engineer — through the storm. It was so exciting!
How many fix the engine scenes have ever had you on the edge of your seat? I mean, in television and movies, sure. The Expanse, Star Trek and Star Wars have all had that kind of action scene — but in an RPG, I had only ever encountered combat scenes that were so thrilling and fast-paced. I really liked that our engineer character got the chance to shine so bright, and that doing his thing was part of the pulse-pounding action.
That was it for that game, though — just a few extra rolls to fix an engine. We hadn’t codified crisis scenes yet, and there were no others in the campaign. But it never left my head and I started thinking of all those scenes on television and in movies, where the stakes are high and the drama is intense — but which aren’t fight scenes. How could I put rules to those and make them just as exciting as battle? I started calling these scenes crises and now they are a part of all my games.
I’ve seen games with skill challenges, extended rolls and that sort of thing — and they’re great. But I’ve not yet found a system that could give them that shot of adrenalin I want, so I work hard to make that happen in my games. Chases, poker games, delivering babies, field surgery, psychic struggles, and yes, fixing engines all get their own high-drama crisis scenes. For the medic, the engineer, the gambler, the mystic — any player character with those special abilities gets a moment in the spotlight, a chance to trot out some non-combat skills and save the party or contribute to the story. And the Storyteller gets a new kind of action scene to change the pace and shake things up from repetitive combat.
For more about crises and building them:
• The Crisis System
• Example Crisis Scene: Dealing with anxiety
• Creating a crisis on the spot
Crisis scenes are a ton of fun, so don’t be surprised if the players jump in with all kinds of their ideas for solving the problem that you dropped in their laps. Say you’ve got a car chase with antagonists racing after the party to finish off the ambassador that they wounded in an attempted assassination. You have rolls for the PC driver to make sharp turns and blast through traffic, rolls for the party to return fire and try to shoot out the pursuit cars’ tires, and other skill rolls to perform surgery in a moving car to save the wounded ambassador. That sounds like a great crisis scene.
Things start off just like you planned and everyone’s doing their best to survive the crisis and save the ambassador, but now one of the players says that they want to jump onto a passing car, take the wheel from the driver, and then try to lead the chase cars away from the party.
Well… that particular move wasn’t in my crisis notes, but there’s no reason not to try it and it does sound pretty badass. Crises need to be flexible so that the players can come up with their own ideas, not just follow steps laid out for them. In some cases, you don’t really have to do anything except describe it differently.
A rooftop foot chase, for example, means jumping between two buildings and a Body + Athletics check — to borrow some Snake Eyes rules — but a player wants to use their grappling hook to snag a water tower and swing over the gap instead. Okay, sure. Make a… Body + Athletics check. It’s the same roll, but the player doesn’t need to know that. And maybe you can give them a bonus for their grappling hook, so they get to enjoy being clever. Win-win!
Sometimes the players just have an idea that takes the crisis totally sideways, though. Jumping off the car to another car and splitting the party up to lead pursuit away, for instance. Since my car chase crisis didn’t have any jumping rolls, now I have to throw one in. Then I need to add a skill check to see how many of the pursuit cars they can lead off. Maybe a Spirit + Intimidation roll to see if they can convince the antagonists to chase them instead of the rest of the team. And perhaps their success on that roll becomes a bonus to the party’s healer, who can operate on the ambassador without quite as many bullets whizzing over their head.
If your players have their own ideas for getting out of the crisis you’ve put them in, that’s great! It’s always a good sign when they get involved and act proactively, and there’s no need to panic. The player will tell you what they want to do, so all you have to respond with is a roll. Most times, you don’t even have to make up something new — the PCs need to get over a canyon, but they want to swing instead of trying to jump. Both of those can be a Body + Athletics check. If they come up with something that does work but is unexpected — like the druid using their magic to make vines grow over the canyon and form a bridge — then maybe you need to change the roll to a Spirit + Casting check, but the difficulty of the roll and the consequences of failure can be the same.
Crises are a great way to spice up a game, to make tasks besides combat more exciting. And if your players enjoy them, then they will come up with their own ideas to meet the challenges of the scene. Encourage that! It means they’re committing to, investing in — and enjoying — the crises, so it’s worth throwing in some unexpected rolls or adapting the rolls you had planned into new ideas.
